elliott

The US has very few allies. Ukraine is not one. Ukraine, as the rest of Europe and many other "allies", are vassals. China is too afraid to put their strenght to use to the same degree as the US because of its weak leaders. The West spending years worrying about an invastion of Taiwan is a joke. Look who has started wars and invasions and coupe detats in the last few decades.

I will just add another comment in case I misunderstood the question. We keep our data to ourselves, we have tight access controls, but to get the data from applications such as SAP you dont any approval from SAP itself. Many of these enterprise software need to interface with other applications, so its a feature of the software the ability to extract data, and often in a variety of ways.

Correct. In our case, all of this is internal and we still have tight controls as to the data each consumer has access to, end-to-end, i.e. controls are in place in the applications that produce the data, in any of consuming application, report, or algorithm, and obviously also in the central data repository. I dont know of us sharing any of our data with any external party (beyond what is needed for doing business with our suppliers and customers). In any case, I think you are very right as to data being key.

Correct, SaaS companies are building agents and they will certainly fight. But I can tell you that data from the applications is already being extracted... Where I work, for example, is a large international company, and due to inorganic growth, there is a proliferation of applications, for example, multiple SAP systems. Data from all those SAP systems is being extracted every single day (MARA, MARC... all those tables), then integrated into a single respository, which many teams downstream are using for their own purposes. Agents that read this data are also being built and connected to the company's LLM. I don't know how it works, really, but with our LLM (just as when you use gemini or chatgpt) we can already ask questions related to our business data. E.g. what is the status of the item 00010 of order 1000056548? Again, this is not the same as saying that SAP, or other SaaS, will be phased out easiliy. To begin with, the company where I work is not doing all this to phase out SAP, by any means. But you can see that things are evolving, and the future may not look like the present.

I didnt mean to say that LLMs will do the accounting or whatever else is needed. I obviously dont know what will happen, but today applications are UI + business logic + data, and on these fronts I see the following developments. Agents, or rather agentic workflows. These are applications based on LLMs. One pattern, here, is "tools". For example, an LLM doesnt know what time it is when you talk to it (just as it doesnt do accounting), but have a tool (e.g. an API) that tells which time it is, and whenever the LLM needs the time, it will say so in its answer, then an intermediate layer "calls" the time API and prompts back the LLM with your initial prompt + the time. Now, the LLM knows the time and can repply accordingly. Data. Many companies are building large data repositories sourcing data from a variety of systems, external and internal, such as operational applications, maybe aligning the data to business processes, and then they make it available company-wide for any consumer. A "consumer" can be a model to improve yield in a factory for a given product, or even another operational application. Now, could applications - as they are conceived today - be replaced by APIs running the business logic, using large common repositories of data, with agents and LLMs acting as a sort of UI for human users, and even as actors and orchestrators at the same time? I am already seeing this for some use-cases. To replace a whole applicaton such as SalesForce, however, is a whole different story. But who knows where technology will be in 10 or 15 years to say?

"AI" software replacing "traditional" software does not make much sense to me. I see the disruption in the application layer becoming obsolete. 50 years ago finance, procurement, sales... these functions existed without relying on SAP or SalesForce. The same kind of transformation can happen again.

yes, time does not play to Chinas favour at all, least of all with their attitude. still, for those that think that Taiwan is becoming more actively "independentist" (whatever that means considering the current state of affairs) there are some things to consider: 1- the independentist candidate won with 40% of the votes (or seats, cant remember), that still means 60% are non independentists 2- the party of the independentist candidate had also won the previous two elections, and the results of thist last one are the worst of the three I wouldnt surprised if many in Taiwan were just happy with things the way they are, and so long as this is the case they care less about this matter than about employment, house affordability, and where will they spend their next summer holidays

Its difficult to know what the end goal of the Chinese really is for Taiwan. The rhetoric could be like the constant harassing they practice - is it aimed to the Taiwanese politicians, or to American politicians? I tend to think that China prefers to let fruits fall on their own, but I am not sure time plays on their favour here. Maybe they just think that there will be a point in time when Taiwan will prefer to look up to them rather than to the US?

how much valuable are statistics like "50% drops occur 2-3 times a century"? what I mean is how reasonable it is to expect just a few data points to have much predicting value? (unless of course we take whatever data we have going back to the Roman Empire and consider it valid and relevant, or use other markets data, in which case we would have to add complete wipe offs to the list of possible events) this is something I usually ask myself also in relation to passive / index investing. you are going to get market returns minus costs, for sure, but to me the important point is whether those returns are going to be satisfactory (to me) or not, and it seems a lot of people in the passive / index community thinks that is going to be the case just so long as you invest for the long term (I am 50% passive, and considering becoming 100% actually)

Since you mention that you try to understand the thesis behind super investors decisions, have you decided what will you do if you dont share their thinking and thesis? I think it would be better to proceed the same whether you like an idea or not, since cloning is delegating investment decisions to super investors after all, but it is up to you obviously.

I have not read the article, but according to professor Pettis, GDP slowing considerably would not be a bad sign but exactly the opposite, a very positive development for China.

most answers refer to financial assets, but unless one expects the exchange rate to revert, there is no benefit in buying after the us dollar strengthened if one buys real estate as the OP mentioned, thats another story.

Wiklerson was the boss but as I posted some time ago there was also Pactorum permanently in Africa, and then the rest of the team which I would say included people from FAH that were supposed to review the investment ideas. What I mean is that either those verifying the ideas did poorly, or simply did not do their job, and that I think goes further than Wilkerson. I am considering this again, but I would love to know if somebody has found a way to invest in African stocks directly, for example in the NSE (kenya).

Do you have access to their funds?

How is FIH able to get those kind of assets at a bargain? If their prospects are so good, one would think that sellers would know. Additionally, one would expect a certain level of scrutiny from the public, press, and/or political rivals that would keep the sale "honest" - even though it is usually said that there is a lot of corruption in India. Thanks.

You might find the answer in Aswath Damodaran's Investment Valuation. I have some notes about the reinvestment rate, so at the very least Damodaran does tackle the concept in that book.

in the recent investors meeting, Vinall was asked about Grenke. it seemed to me that he does not think management did anything really wrong (or so bad, maybe) to have been subjected to such scrutiny by Bafin, and that what happened is in great part Bafin overdoing it to make up for some case or another where Bafin did not do their job

some comment suggest that Putin may not "survive" this war any realistic contenders at this point? I wonder if whatever group seizes power post putin is more agreeable to the West or more aggressive

it would be interesting to read a similar discussion from 5-10 years ago additionally, have you considered how many of us here are long term investors? from the people posting in the threads I follow I tend to think that few, very few (this is ONLY my gut feeling - not to mention that we all may have our own definition of what a long term investor is). the thing is that while short term investors may give you good long term advice, you may stil want to bear the fact in mind

unfortunately, I dont think thats US exclusive. another thing that strikes me about all this, and which the media has a lot to do, is the suppression of diversity of thinking. for example, if you have business in Russia and dont leave the country, you have become evil. so companies must leave Russia even when their actions are only going to hurt the Russian population, not Putin and company. this may deviate from the topic too much, but I think this conflict has made this so much clear. the media has taken their side, and either you are on theirs or you are on the enemys. there is no other option.

how will the relationship between Ukraine and NATO change after this? or, rather, how is it already changing now? if the west/nato and ukraine flirted about becoming allies, but now the west/nato doesnt provide the support the Ukraine needs, one would think the relationship would somehow change. now, the Ukraine knows they are not in NATO yet, but they are being invaded. that must have some effect on how they think their requests for help should be handled regardless of their membership status.

Inditex. At 52w lows. About 7% of its stores are located in Russia, 1% in Ukraine.

Inditex

Source? My understanding is that they were asking for precise, targeted measures that may possibly use SWIFT, but not an exclusion like the one you mention. Thanks!

october 2021 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59005300